What may or may not have transpired between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni during production of It Ends With Us has taken up a lot of oxygen the past year amid the misconduct accusations and legal battles between the two. However, while the alleged preemptive online smear campaign against the Another Simple Favor actress has received second billing for the most part, the retaliation claims may end up being the marquee player of next year’s trial.
The heightened and possibly strengthened role of Lively’s retaliation claims against Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios brass and PR team come in no small part due to Rebel Wilson and Taylor Swift, according to a court filing this week and a just released metadata study.
(L-R) Rebel Wilson and Taylor Swift
Getty Images
“GUDEA found a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively,” says a data analysis by behavioral intelligence startup GUDEA, citing a surge in harsh online “inauthentic narratives” around the political and cultural beliefs of the godmother of one of Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ kids and the October release of her album The Life of a Showgirl. “This overlap reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations.”
Seeking total damages of around $500 million, Lively claims most recently in an early November filing that the online slagging stained her reputation, caused personal and family distress and cost her roles on-screen, and endorsement and “speaking engagement” earnings. As well, and perhaps getting to the true heart of her December 2024-filed complaint against the Bryan Freedman-represented Wayfarer, PR firm The Agency Group, and Baldoni himself with the California Civil Rights department, there’s the matters of profits lost and royalties never earned from her previously lucrative Blake Brown Beauty products and her beverage holding company Betty B Holdings supposedly because of the online hate-on.
Unlike Lively’s various legal actions against Agency Group boss Melissa Nathan, her alleged self-described “hired gun” and digital right-hand man Jed Wallace and fellow publicist Jennifer Abel, the GUDEA study doesn’t name names of who could be behind the online attacks on Swift and Lively, respectively.
It does note that the “presence of a small set of Outliers, Facilitators, and Influencers active across both datasets suggests shared amplification pathways and a potential recurring network of accounts capable of escalating or ideologically reframing celebrity narratives.”
Reps for Swift, who has a six-part The End of an Era docuseries launching on Disney+ on Friday, did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the study. Yet, a source close to events quipped “connect the dots” when it comes to online blowback against superstar Swift. Noting all the tabloid claims of deep riffs between the “The Fate of Ophelia” singer and Lively, the source also referenced efforts to “pull Taylor into this lawsuit over and over” by Baldoni and Wayfarer’s legal team.
It should also be noted that Swift, who has made several cameos in the Lively vs. Baldoni saga over the past year and contributed a song to the soundtrack of the Sony-distributed IEWU, is on a list of potential witnesses for the trial now scheduled to begin in May 2026 — though that list has a lot of big names on it, like hubby Reynolds and his Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Hugh Jackman.
In heavily redacted paperwork put before the federal court by PR firm JonesWorks’ Stephanie Jones in her own lawsuit over her former employee Abel and the Wayfarer inner circle, the onetime Baldoni publicist’s attorneys allege that the online attacks that Lively claims she was subjected to in a preemptive move by Baldoni’s Nathan-led crisis PR team were used against her and others too.
Those others include The Deb producer Amanda Ghost in Wilson’s multi-national dispute with her over the indie drama and accusations of financial sticky fingers and (denied) misconduct with actress Charlotte MacInnes. For the record, the always busy Freedman has represented Wilson in the U.S. portion of her battles and accusations against Ghost and other producers of The Deb, which as of now does not have a U.S. distributor.
Referencing texts between Nathan (who at a previous firm worked for Johnny Depp during his successful defamation trial against ex-wife and widely online attacked Amber Heard) and TAG staffer Katie Case (whose deposition in the Lively-Baldoni matter has had a lot of traction in recent months) that say “Rebel wants one of those sites,” Jones’ proposed amended complaint against ex-employee and Nathan pal Abel asserts “the connection between these websites is not speculative.”
GUDEA may not name names, but Jones and her Jonesworks lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan do name names — at least a couple.
A memorandum backing Jones’ desire to file an amended complaint states: “The September 2025 deposition of a former employee of Nathan revealed that she, at Nathan’s instruction and in coordination with Jed Wallace, helped create the defamatory websites about the Jones Parties — just as she had done at least two other times, again at Nathan’s instruction and in coordination with Wallace, against other individuals. This evidence requires identification of Nathan as a previously-pled Doe Defendant, and supports the additional tortious interference claim against her.”
Nathan has denied in court filings that she had anything to do with any sites or online swipes against Ghost, but Jones’ proposed amended complaint drills down on the data, so to speak.
“Recent forensic analysis of the Jones, Amanda Ghost, and Alexander Brothers websites has determined that those websites and the promotion of them share certain digital fingerprints, including boosting their placement in search engine results by using backlinks (that is, links to the websites from third party websites, social media accounts, and blogs) created by similar authors,” the frequently blacked out filing says. “This forensic evidence supports only one conclusion: these websites were created by the same individual or coordinated set of individuals, i.e., Nathan and Wallace.”
Nathan, in both her capacity for herself and as a rep for Baldoni and his crew, did not reply to requests for her POV on the allegations in Jones’ latest filings. Of note, since Jones’ filings on December 8, a number of the sites cited in her paperwork have disappeared or gone dark.
Representatives for Lively, who has a judge-ordered virtual settlement scheduling conference coming up on December 15, also did not respond Thursday.
As for those settlement talks Judge Lewis Liman is requiring the Lively and Baldoni parties to have going into the New Year — don’t read too much into them. Liman pushed back the trial start date from March to May this week because of a backlog of criminal cases on his docket and any hope of this bitter battle getting resolved before a trial is worth a swing. All the lawyers have to do is have one discussion of a settlement, and, from what I hear, it will be short.
As Lively said in a December 4 filing, the actress wants her “day in court,” and that means this trial is happening.
To that, the next significant date in all this is January 22. That’s when the lawyers are penciled in to argue before Liman on Baldoni and Wayfarer’s November-filed summary judgment to have the case dismissed.